DIGGING IN THE RIVER-BED FOR WATER.
From this point, the explorers descended the valleys of the Arkansas and its largest tributary, the Canadian, to Fort Smith, and from thence through the growing settlements of the territory,[3] to the Mississippi, visiting, by the way, the famous Hot Springs of the Washita. The upper waters of the Arkansas and Platte were reported by them to lie in sandy wastes unfit for occupation by civilized man. Often the explorers would have to dig in the bed of the river to get water, while the arid appearance of every thing around, caused by the disappearance of the rivers[4] beneath their own sands, the want of wood and absence of game, stamped the whole region as one on which nature had set the seal of perpetual barrenness and desolation.
The sum of these discoveries had traced out, as it were, the larger veins through which emigration, the life-blood of the country, was ultimately to flow.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The Platte was called Nebraska by the Otoes, whence comes the name of the State in which it chiefly lies. Some authorities make the Indian word mean the same thing as the French, or flat and shallow, which describes it well.
[2] Major Stephen Harriman Long had been assistant professor of mathematics at West Point. He afterwards (1823-24) explored the Upper Mississippi. Journal of the first expedition published in 1823, of the second 1824.
[3] Arkansas Territory was formed in 1819, capital Little Rock, then a village built on a bluff near the beginning of the hilly region. The name comes from a rock in the river exposed at low water. Fort Smith was a new military post. Other settlements were scattered along the Arkansas from the White River Cut-off to Belle Point, and on Red River as far as the Kiamesha. Though numerous, Long says all were small. Besides these, the Cherokees were also forming settlements on the Arkansas about Cadron, which Long often found superior, in respect of the comforts of life, to those of the whites. These people were the vanguard of their nation, to which Government had ceded lands in Arkansas Territory, and was removing from Georgia beyond the Mississippi. They owned black slaves, the same as the whites. They raised considerable cotton, which they wove into cloth for their own use.
[4] Disappearance of the Rivers. Long's party travelled more than a hundred miles along the dry bed of the Arkansas without once seeing water. Of course they hastened on through this desert with all speed.
MISSOURI, AND THE COMPROMISE OF 1821.
Far back, when the original States were yet colonies, and while the people of Massachusetts were solemnly deliberating how to deliver themselves from oppression, a letter was read to the body to whom this grave question had been committed, asking it to consider the state of the negro slaves in the province.